With digital music downloads now the norm and CD sales steadily declining; its clear all music has a digital future. But some big name groups still haven’t joined the digital revolution, the biggest of which is The Beatles.{ad}

The reason the remastered Beatles songs haven’t made an appearance on market-leader Apple’s iTunes service is all down to money. Dhani Harrison, George Harrison’s son, has stated that the team that manages the Beatles music is just not happy with the royalty deal being offered. Dhani explained:

We’re losing money every day … So what do you do? You have to have your own delivery system, or you have to do a good deal with Steve Jobs. But he says that a download is worth 99 cents, and we disagree.

With talks stalled at Apple it looks like the alternative to a big digital music store release is being investigated and we could now see a dedicated Beatles music store appear. If it does, you can surely expect to pay more than 99 cents per track.

Matthew’s Opinion
I realize The Beatles are one of the top groups in terms of saleability and fan base, but I don’t see why their songs should command more than the standard market rate. The fact that they are so popular means they will sell a lot of songs therefore generating a lot of royalty income.

Attempting to create your own dedicated site will clearly eat into the profits received from the sale of the music. Instead of using a well-managed, established digital music service they will instead have to spend significantly to build the infrastructure to support the site traffic and then it could all go wrong on the first day it is live.

You have to wonder how much they think can be charged for the music as even the most devoted fan is not going to pay significantly more than 99 cents per track. I suggest they go back to talking to the established online music stores and sort out distribution asap.

For now the closest you will be able to get to a Beatles song release is Beatles Rock Band due out on September 9th.

Reader Comments

http://www.beatlesof.blogspot.com/ beatles.blogspot.com

While I think the Beatles songs are better than most of the songs in iTunes store but they should be in the same price. The Beatles always give the best to their fans. Remember the days when they denied to put singles in their albums because they didn’t want fans to buy it twice? I agree with Matthew that selling with iTunes is easy and almost 100% no trouble. But it’s boring. I wish they try a new way. Like they always do.

Bill

The question is probably not the 99 cents per se, but the amount which goes to the distributor as opposed to that which goes to the artist.
I hope the Beatles will eliminate the middleman.
I also hope that the tracks are remixed and remastered and offered in WAV. format. Mp3s sound terrible and I won’t be buying any of those….but if the Beatles catalogue is remixed from the original 2, 4, and 8 track tapes and offered as WAV files, I will buy the entire catalogue..

Alex

I don’t know much about the Beatles doing it specifically, and I’m not suggesting your wrong, however if a modern band declined to put a popular track on an album, I’d assume it was to avoid canabalising single sales.
I’m normally right behind money going to the artist and no one else, but won’t lose any sleep about the surviving Beatles not adding to the fortunes they have already earned. Whatever they are doing they need to do it quickly, as they must be approaching the end of their copyright period.